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Archive for January, 2014

One of the tags read ‘F@#k Australia Day. No pride in genocide.’ That isn’t vandalism. It is telling the truth, but telling the truth is, as Orwell noted, a revolutionary act in a time of universal deceit. Evidently writing the word genocide on a wall is a crime while the actual genocide against indigenous Australians isn’t.

WOULD YOU drink the water coming out of West Virginia’s Elk River? THE BIGGEST lesson of this entirely unnatural disaster should be evident by now: Don’t trust the polluters to police themselves or clean up their messes.

Our only hope today lies in our ability to recapture the revolutionary spirit and go out into a sometimes hostile world declaring eternal opposition to poverty, racism and militarism. With this powerful commitment, we shall boldly challenge the status quo and unjust mores, and thereby speed the day when “every valley shall be exalted, and every mountain and hill shall be made low; and the crooked shall be made straight and the rough places plain.”

Gilbert Achcar, a veteran socialist who grew up in Lebanon, is the author of numerous books on the Middle East, including The People Want: A Radical Exploration of the Arab Uprising and most recently Marxism, Orientalism, Cosmopolitanism. He spoke with Eric Ruder for Socialist Worker US in December on the eve of the third anniversary of the Arab uprisings. Achar will be speaking at Marxism 2014 over Easter in Melbourne.

The consciousness of privilege in this theoretical conception is an anti-totalizing view of society, where relationships to a single hierarchy of oppression must first be analyzed separately from the social totality, before (at best) later being reintegrated into a more complete view, writes Tad Tietze in Socialist Worker US. In many cases, it is not even the hierarchy as a whole that is considered, but simply a comparison of privileges held by one individual and another to decide whether or not the more privileged one has the authority to even hold a particular view.

Will Indonesia start to turn back Australia’s boats? By sending 3 boats to the border between Australia and Indonesia, and with a frigate on the way, the Indonesians are upping the ante against the racist anti-refugee Abbott government. Can trade embargoes be far away?

Independent columnist Mark Steel points out that “the war to end all wars” didn’t. The war was “plainly a just war,” says UK Education Minister Michael Gove, because of the German attitude toward expansionism. And we certainly couldn’t stand by while another country fancied a bit of expansionism. Luckily, the one thing that you can say about the British in the century before 1914 is that at no time did it consider expanding or taking over anywhere or swiping anything from abroad.

The corporate media and football (soccer) officials this summer have launched a hysterical campaign against football fans write Benjamin Solah and Steven Chang in Red Flag. The spectre hanging over all of this is the imposition of law and order politics in the cultural sphere of professional sports.